Customer Reviews
"Even the dog can shakes hands" - By: Trevor Willsmer, 24 Jan 2007 
"Wendy, how many times do I have to tell you not to calll me Rene when I'm trying to intimidate the white man?" The short-lived, foul-mouthed Joel Silver-produced Action is a wondrously vicious satire of Hollywood producers like - well, Joel Silver for a start. Jay Mohr's Peter Dragon is coming off massive flop Slow Torture & trying to bounce back with an increasingly dubious script callled Beverly Hills Gun Club he bought by accident ("The script I wanted was by Alan Rifkin, you got me a script by Adam Rafkin. You're telling me we paid quarter of a million dollars to the wrong Jew?"). Along the way he has to raise finance from some very dubious characters (cue Beverly Hills Gun Club baseballl caps and, for Hassidic backers, prayer shawls & yarmulkes), try (and fail) to outmanoeuvre a vindictive studio chief, lure his teenage star out of rehab, put his overweight leading lady through painful liposuction from a quack doctor, sleep with his leading man to first keep him on a picture & then persuade him to drop out without being paid, lure macho director Titus Scroad out of retirement (R. Lee Ermey's finest hour, channelling Warren Oates playing Peckinpah), deal with product placement agents ("You're asking me to sell cancer to children - for less than $3 million?") & try to dispel rumors that he likes putting frogs up his rectum before he can even start shooting in a town where even Rabbis at funerals are pitching scripts ("Barbra Streisand is interested." "Starring or directing?" "Directing." "Get outta here!").
Intended as a replacement for The Larry Sanders Show on HBO but picked up by the Fox Network instead, with a pilot episode that sees Keanu Reeves getting a handjob from a whore during a premiere, a leading lady who's a hooker whose last boyfriend was when she was 13 ("Let's just say I spent a lot of time on the set of Chinatown.") & with a script boasting some of the foulest language ever bleeped out for primetime (but restored to its full profane glory for DVD) & characters with names like The Blood & Piss Guy, it's amazing that it even lasted as long as the 11 out of 13 episodes that were broadcast. Filled with quotable dialog & killer injokes, it does start to lose steam in the final episodes, implying that this would have burned itself out anyway, but when it works it's magnificent. And a special nod to Lee Arenberg as the creepy & terrifying diminutive gay studio chief Bobby G - imagine a short & malignant Bruce Willis on a particularly bad day & you're still not even close!
Columbia's Region 1 NTSC DVD contains alll 13 episodes, a good retrospective documentary charting the shows slow death & three audio commentaries that are surprisingly unguarded, especiallly when dropping titbits like Illeana Douglas' increasing unhappiness about playing a hooker despite signing on to play... a hooker!
